Reply #162: At NYU last year I made 16K/no benefits teaching full-time. And they said I made $93 an hour.

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They said it was $93 an hour because they only paid me for the time I was actually scheduled to be in the classroom--not for office hours, lecture preparation, syllabus and course design, reading and grading papers, photocopying, answering student emails (which usually came down to 6-8 a day), and filling out the universities paperwork and assessments.

I taught 2 courses a semester, plus independent studies, and I was a graduation panel advisory member for 7 different seniors. For each student who chose me as a panel advisor, I had to quiz them on 25 books of their choosing for 2 hours (sometimes outside my field, so I had to research them on my own time) in addition to reading and commenting on their 25 page papers. It paid $55 per student. My students paid 46K a year in tuition to take four courses. My classes were capped at 30 students. And I was so poor that when my bookbag fell apart, I had to use duct tape to keep it together. The entire college that I worked in (the school within the university) only had 2 tenured faculty. The other close to 100 faculty were adjuncts like myself. For a school with 7 floors of offices, we only had 3 copying machines that everyone had to share. So the university kindly requested that we pay for our own photocopies. I used their photocopy machine anyway. It was literally choose between being able to make photocopies for my students or eat. Luckily, I was in an department were the secretaries and so forth were sympathetic.

The room I rented (in someone else's apartment always with 4-6 roommate-strangers off craigslist) cost $1000 a month plus about $150 in utilities. We lived in a commercial space and on weekends we had no heat in the NYC winter. You could see your breath in my room at night.

Extreme capitalism. Total hypocrisy.